Research Database
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Extreme Winds Alter Influence of Fuels and Topography on Megafire Burn Severity in Seasonal Temperate Rainforests under Record Fuel Aridity
Year: 2022
Nearly 0.8 million hectares of land were burned in the North American Pacific Northwest (PNW) over two weeks under record-breaking fuel aridity and winds during the extraordinary 2020 fire season, representing a rare example of megafires in forests west of the Cascade Mountains. We quantified the relative influence of weather, vegetation, and topography on patterns of high burn severity (>75% tree mortality) among five synchronous megafires in the western Cascade Mountains. Despite the conventional wisdom in climate-limited fire regimes that regional drivers (e.g., extreme aridity, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Summer and Fall Extreme Fire Weather Projected to Occur More Often and Affect a Growing Portion of California throughout the 21st Century
Year: 2022
Annual burned area has increased in California over the past three decades as a result of rising temperatures and a greater atmospheric demand for moisture, a trend that is projected to continue throughout the 21st century as a result of climate change. Here, we implement a bias-correction and statistical downscaling technique to obtain high resolution, daily meteorological conditions for input into two fire weather indices: vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and the Canadian Fire Weather Index System (FWI). We focus our analysis on 10 ecoregions that together account for the diverse range of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Trends in forest structure restoration need over three decades with increasing wildfire activity in the interior Pacific Northwest US
Year: 2022
Wildfire is a keystone ecological process in many forests worldwide, but fire exclusion and suppression have driven profound shifts in forest structure (e.g., increased density, canopy cover, biomass) that have contributed to increases in large, high-severity fire in many seasonally dry forests and woodlands of the western United States. Comparisons between contemporary and historic range of variability (HRV) in forest structure can quantify the amount and types of restoration that shift landscapes toward structural conditions that have his- torically fostered resilience to fire. However,…
Publication Type: Journal Article